總網頁瀏覽量

2012年3月31日 星期六

The Mill and the Cross (磨坊與十字架)

Can a painting become the subject of a film? Can screen images be like paintings? In the film The Mill and the Cross, we see how various details of a painting, "The Way to Calvary" (1564) by the famous 16th century Dutch painter Peter Breugel the Elder (Rutger Hauer) came to be painted. We learn about it through the dialogue between Breugel and his patron (Michael York) about how the artist wishes to capture a "panoramic" view of life in a small  village at the foot of a limestone hill in 16th century Flanders and thereby to render it "eternal" by freezing it in the form of his painting and how in that painting, he wishes to include "everything"! .

There are more than  a hundred characters in the painting, of different ages, sex, occupation and engaged in various kind of everyday activity. Towering above them all is a huge wind mill atop a craggy limestone hill, turning its creaky but massive wheels around against a cloudy sky, and as it does so, grinding flour for the bread of life but otherwise indifferent to the fate of the various villagers below, subjected to all kinds of random violence visited upon them and dumbly accepted by them as part of great Plan of God, with endurance but without comprehension either by Nature or by the mercenary Spanish soldiers hired by its conquerors, the Emperor of Spain. God is everywhere. There is constant flogging of the villagers, dressed up against their will as Christ figures, being crucified, to "edify" them for the sake of their immortal souls, being tied to a cart wheel and placed on top of a pole to be pecked at by carrions. Below them one always finds a Mary figure (Charlotte Rampling), the Mother of Sorrow, mourning the death of lost souls at the foot of the crucifixes. She confesses to his son that she does not know why there should be so much suffering and questions whether there is any purpose to it. Whatever the answer to her questions may be, we see "heretics" buried alive. In the mean time, life goes on, the poor peasants making love, making babies, eking out a bare existence with little in the way of material comforts, taking time off whenever they can to relieve the hardships and monotony of their short and brutish life to enjoy a little, by dancing to the tune of a medieval horn.The happiest amongst them are the little children, who do not yet know anything about life's miseries and life's incessant toil. They would eat their daily bread after which they would  run around, play fighting with each other, jumping up and down on one of their brothers covered under a blanket on a bed. People live with their sheep, their geese, their cow under the same roof. From what we see, their lives look not that much different from those of their animals.

Breugel explains to his patron how in his painting, he has a focus, a Christ-figure and his death which remains but a tiny detail, one amongst many, practically drowned by a sea of other details, how there is light on the left, darkness to the right, what symbolize life and what death and how he intends to capture a slice of life and how to immortalize it through his painting, and how in his painting, the miller has replaced God, how the turning of his mill has replaced the turning of man's destiny under the former predestined God-given Fate of man and how his painting is a web of life, like the web of the spider that he sees upon waking up one morning in the fields when he was overcome with tiredness whilst trying to compose a sketch of his famous painting.

The film, directed by Polish director Lech Majewski, looks to me like a series of paintings, with some of its characters suddenly coming alive and us following brief snippets of their life. He has obviously taken meticulous care on how  to compose his screen images, so that even the natural scenery which one sees on the outside of windows of his characters is also "framed" as if it were another painting. The boundary between life and its representation, between reality and art, between fact and fiction, between static painted images and moving film images is imperceptibly transcended. The painting has become "alive" ! Without a doubt, it must be "the" most  beautiful film I have seen at the HKIFF this year.
.

/p>

6 則留言:

  1. El Zorro、 週末愉快!
    [只微回覆04/01/2012 08:15:42]謝!
    [版主回覆04/01/2012 08:11:29]You should be happy too, now that your better half is back!

    回覆刪除
  2. (O ^ ~ ^ O) 唔係 星期六 笑話 咩 ?
    [版主回覆04/01/2012 08:15:04]I was stricken down by a very virulent strain of flu, probably from being exhausted by all the rushing about to see films and doing all sorts of other things apart from watching films! There was a bad joke though (See the blog on Sleepless Night)

    回覆刪除
  3. Works of art set in Medieval Europe always got a poetic beauty or charm and I like paintings that depicted reality rather than abstract ones.
    [版主回覆04/01/2012 10:56:24]Artists always need to "create" works of art that suit the sensibilities of their own age. In the Medieval Ages, everything must be related in one way of another to God. In the Renaissance when there was renewed interest in Man himself, we find works of art that show the strength and beauty of human forms and of natural beauty of things in this world. In the age of classicism, everything must conform to reason, hence to balance and unity in diversity with parallels, contrasts, theme and variations, main motifs and sub-motifs and with the discovery of human psyche at the end of the 19th Century and early 20th century, we find artists who wish to emphasize human emotions and the fantastic images surging up in man's subconscious in his dreams and mimesis or representational art ceases to occupy the position they formerly did and with the triumph of Enlightenment Reason, we find artists who wish to transcend the bounds of two dimensionality by showing the same objects from different cubist points of view at the same time and others who wish to emphasizes the intrinsic beauty of lines, forms, color, intensity and texture in themselves and those who wish to break down the boundary between "objective" reality which however is never "truly" objective and subjective "perception" or "experience of reality. But as in so many spheres of human endeavours, there are always those who wish to continue working along "old", "established" or "conventional" lines.Likes and dislikes are always something very personal to the "consumer" of artistic "productions".

    回覆刪除
  4. Thanks for your sharing. As one reviewer says, "its wondrous scenes entering the viewer like a dream enters a sleeping body."
    [版主回覆04/03/2012 07:13:42]That's an apt comment as we see the figures come to life in the painting like scenery before the camera lens closes in upon them.

    回覆刪除
  5. I love Peter Breugel’s paintings for his “panoramic” view of the rustic life, the coloration, the richness in allegorical meanings and the funny satires (sometimes to the extent of being bizarre). His painting genre is on the same line as that of Bosch (also a Dutch painter).

    By the way, have you seen the movie<Girl with a Pearl Earring>, also a film based on a painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer?
    [版主回覆04/03/2012 07:27:43]You're right, Bosch is a "fantastic" painter in both senses of the word: he is very very good and he paints images of human tales of "fantasy" in all kinds of religious and moral allegories.
    I got "Girl with a "Pearl Earring". I love it..

    回覆刪除
  6. Can't help re-reading you blog and the trailer. How I regret having missed this fantastic film!
    I should go grap a DVD if there is one.
    [版主回覆04/03/2012 07:28:53]Good idea! You won' regret it.

    回覆刪除